Why are Ice Cream Machines at McDonald's Always Broken?
This is not a conspiracy theory - it's a story of bullies crowding out smaller, newer, better companies.
Whenever I walk into a McD store, the smell of fresh fries fills me up with joy. The hustle-bustle of life, kids asking their grandpa to buy them a Coke, a young couple sitting across, holding hands, probably with no sense of time or their surrounding. The whole red-yellow atmosphere brings out joy and happiness. But, what goes on behind the scenes is dark. Sinister. Read on.
As per Investopedia,
McDonald's is the world's largest fast-food restaurant chain and one of the best-known brand names. The company has more than 39,000 locations in about 100 countries. A pioneer in the fast-food industry, the company has maintained consistent, moderate growth through affordable prices, speedy service, and by constantly expanding and refreshing its menu offerings.
Ray Kroc, the man behind making McD such a giant, was a salesman at the core. What he did best was pursue something with single-minded dedication and focus. One of his most famous quotes from the movie “Founder” goes to show the ethos with which McD has been built (watch time: 1 min).
You see, McD doesn’t own and operate all of its stores on its own. It looks out for prime locations in the best cities of the world, helps a vibrant, energetic entrepreneur set up a shop there (franchise), trains their team on how to run the restaurant, and lets them use its brand name for a fee (royalty).
Simple enough?
Naaah. Not so much for the franchise owners. After all, McD’s franchise document in itself is a very, very long read (link to a 413 pager doc here).
Within this doc (page 4), there’s this peculiar disclaimer:
Why does the company explicitly specify this? Because it has a specific standard to maintain. That’s how it keeps its brand identity intact. Or, so it wants us to believe.
Maybe there’s something more going on here. Something that breeds from being at the top, with a few old players, all the time. Something that breeds from the creed of capitalism.
There was this whole social media frenzy, some time back, around why McD is always out of ice-creams. It is one of the top-selling items for any Quick Service Restaurant (QSR). Then, why not meticulously plan for it?
Looking at the social media noise around this, McD released a statement that “we ran out of ice cream” is a simple excuse given by McD employees when the ice cream machine is in maintenance. After all, it takes 4 hours to get the machine ready for work.
This was a digestible excuse, until...
A guy in the US went around asking other food joints whether they had a similar maintenance problem (mostly all large food joints use machines from the same company - Taylor). They cheerfully responded that this was not the case (check out the 30 mins video at the end of this piece - has everything covered in detail).
Then why was McD alone facing this issue? Why did no other joint have any troubles?
Because McD has a specific model of Taylor’s ice cream machine that is different from other joints. Suspicious, this guy started digging deep. As he went through hundreds of pages of user instruction manuals, he realised that this model was not easy to fix. For a layperson, it was impossible to understand all the technicalities and repair them on their own.
So, what would a franchise owner do? After all, there were customers to be taken care of, food to be served. Could they spend more time on fixing these ice cream machines? Nope.
They had to call in Taylor’s service repair guys. And this “repair” service, of course, is chargeable. And, translates to hundreds of dollars a month in cost for a franchise. So much so, that 25% of Taylor’s revenue comes from repairs only.
Clearly, the manufacturer has no incentive to improve its machines and take a hit on their plum revenue source. McD also is silent, and does nothing, as it is the franchise partners that pay at the end of the day. Moreover, McD and Taylor’s partnership goes back decades.
But, how did this whole thing come to light?
Well, there’s this company, called Kytch, that created a solution for the franchise-owners to reduce the ice cream machines’ downtime, by helping them understand the problem with the machine in detail.
Here’s how they explain what they do:
Some franchise partners praised the product in some joint-meeting.
Looks like it didn’t go down well with McD. They issued a statement banning franchise owners from using Kytch, telling them how the product may harm customers (seriously?) and that if they continue using it, their insurance and warranties would stand nullified.
Wow. This is preposterous. Can they really do this?
Yes, they can! Remember the 413 pgs long document? But, why on earth will they want their own franchises to suffer?
What this investigative journalist guy from the video below found out was that McD is looking to use a device that Taylor’s sister company is making (which is just like Kytch’s device!).
So much so to keep user data with themselves.
So much so to keep their monopoly.